Cooking
If we are making it the right way, our family sauce takes twenty-four hours to make. Most of this time is spent simmering the meat, sausage, ribs, neck bones, etc., with the tomatoes. Some of it is spent stirring, adding various spices and vegetables for taste. As it finishes up, my whole family gravitates towards the stove where my mom plates the leftover meat from the pot. And there is plenty leftover because when we do make it the right way it is in gargantuan portions, which we freeze and save for months afterwards. We usually only indulge in that kind of extravagant effort on holidays. In my memories, holidays always smells like sauce.
Cooking has always carried a twinge of mysticism in my family. My great-grandpa refused to learn English. But after immigrating to America, he still managed to successfully sell the meat he butchered door-to-door. My grandma opened a restaurant up the road from what was then a mine, and would earn a small fortune whenever the workers went on break. She woke in the early hours of the morning to bake fresh bread using the secret recipe I’ve only seen once, barely legible on a heavily worn scrap of cream paper. My mother claims she fell in love with my father when she saw him working at that restaurant, in the back sculpting hundreds of meatballs by hand. And I have very clear memories of the restaurant my parents opened later; of pots of sauce so huge my grandma had to stand on a stool to stir them, of mastering the art of folding a pizza box, of flour on my face and my overalls.
Even today, long after both of those restaurants closed, my grandma died, and my parents divorced, cooking remains a slightly spiritual event for me. I think of it differently than I think about making my own meals by myself; I never cook alone, I only really cook with others. If I am not hurriedly grabbing a plate, or asking someone what temperature to set, or saying “taste it now…does it need more garlic?” it does not feel the same. There is something fantastically distinct about making food with other people, something that makes me happy and homesick all at once.
